Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs.

The part about learning Russian was not entirely a joke btw. Earlier today I filled up two 15 liter water jugs. The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection recently sent out a leaflet asking all citizen to stock up on water, durable food items, hygiene products, matches, candles, firewood etc. to be prepared to survive for up to a week without electricity, tap water, open stores etc. in case of a “crisis or war”, so if it’s just my paranoid delusion, at least It’s not just me.

To my country, and Europe in general, one obvious implication of Trump’s return to power is that our NATO membership no longer offers us any strong protection against Russia. All I can do is hope that the nuclear arsenals of France and Great Britain will make Putin think twice about attacking, but honestly, if I were Putin, even I wouldn’t put much stock in their willingness to use them. As others have pointed out, outsourcing our security concerns to America will go down in history as one of the greatest blunders ever, almost as bad as outsourcing our manufacturing sector to China.

Trump’s promised trade-war with Europe, tariffs on European goods etc. is also likely to trigger a recession that will almost certainly lead to increased support for the already powerful, pro-Putin, right-wing populist movements of Europe like Rassemblement National and Alternative für Deutschland. A tiny country like my own, which cannot fight a war on our own for very long no matter how much we spend on national defense (far too little, admittedly), may soon find itself out of allies, and, of course the threat from our own far right is only too real.

Love it or hate it, one of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was the battle of Helm’s Deep from the Lord of the Rings movie Two Towers. The main battle itself was, of course, entertaining enough, but to me the most memorable part was the tense, claustrophobic feeling inside the fortress while Saruman’s vast army was approaching, the lights of thousands of burning torches were appearing on the horizon, and the sound of thousands of marching feet kept getting louder every minute. It’s one of those scenes you really have to see in a good cinema to get the full effect: Seeing it on a computer screen or even a large TV doesn’t do it justice. That’s kind of how this feels, except that this time it’s for real, and there is no Gandalf, or Éomer, or Treebeard coming to the rescue. The enemy is not yet inside the fortress, or even at the gates, but the torches are on the horizon and the sound of marching feet is getting louder by the minute…